Education, Scalable Solutions, and Human Behavior

January 10th, 2017: As a tree grows, it shifts its resources from growing quickly to growing deeply. That is how I’ve grown this past year, and my personal mission statement, lightly updated but more heavily imprinted, is a reflection of that growth. January 9th, 2019: As I read this personal mission statement over, I conclude that I’m…

Yes, it’s already 2019, but you’ll have to forgive me. The end of Autumn is December 21st and I was on vacation! 🙂 This past quarter has been tough. I felt like I was in a malaise of inaction where I wasn’t executing on what I had intended to do. I didn’t host the #NYCEDU…

This has been a great quarter. Setting priorities for just 3 things has made all the difference! Those three things were: Identity Work Community Building Funding A Look Back Identity Work I’ve been doing a lot of reading this past quarter about race and racism with a specific focus on the Asian American experience….

I turned 30 in March! I love birthdays, they remind me of how loved I am by friends both old and new. My birthday was also a good chance to reflect on life in general and I got to say, it’s pretty great. I’m doing what I love, making a positive impact in the world,…

Welcome On March 7th, 2018, Jessica Falkenthal, John Baldo, and I presented Growing an Education Innovation Community at SXSW EDU, one of the country’s most influential education innovation conferences. We wanted to support, inspire, and learn from fellow education innovation community builders so that together, we could work towards that better future for all. This post…

In this post, I live blog my Spanish Learning Journey so that I can look back and see my progress, but also so that I can be helpful to anyone else who may share my learning style and context! This may be especially useful if you: Are learning Spanish from scratch (though many of the…

I spent much of this last quarter in deep contemplation, both with other people and in my own writing and reading. Questions I grappled with included: What does it take to create a process towards equity that in and of itself is equitable? How do I determine, as the Founder and Executive Director of #NYCEDU, where we…

Cornell BigRed//Hacks is the oldest student-run hackathon in the country. This year, 40+ teams worked on hacking together a technology solution for an education problem. I was invited to give the keynote speech as an educator, serial entrepreneur, and community builder. This is a transcript of my speech.

For the first time in five years, I didn’t organize Startup Weekend Education NYC. Instead, I was its facilitator! This was significant for several reasons. I passed the baton. Eugene Leventhal and his organizing team did all the heavy lifting. I was there to share our previous Startup Weekend Education NYC resources, but they recruited the coaches,…

November of 2013, I gave a TEDx talk on how to fail successfully based on my own experiences. At the time, I was a budding entrepreneur who was working on a multitude of ideas including one that I laugh about most: The Conversation Coach. The main point of the talk was: “For my entire life I…

“For my entire life I was taught how to be successful, but I was not taught to fail.” But “the only thing that’s certain about the future is that it’s uncertain. So failure is inevitable. And if failure is inevitable, we need to work that into our process of learning and growing.”